Really great post about what makes a technology company (and what doesn't).

"Paragraphs, headings, blockquotes, articles, ordered and unordered lists, and so on, all emerged from age-old ways of working with text. Now new cowpaths are being paved on the web itself, and we need the people who love the text the most to get involved in where we go. We need you."

"Noticing is important, but what’s more important is sharing what one observes to define the edges of the experiences we share. This overlap bonds us, and the best part of paying attention is that it reminds us that we are occupying the same space at the same time as others. We are a part of the world, even in those in-between spaces.

All that’s required is to stop for a moment."

Vignette about leaving Kicrosoft Word for better tools.

A quick explanation as to the why of Markdown.

"In short, by blogging the right things, and connecting the links together when a conversation gets going, we can really make things happen. That's still exciting."

Interesting perspective.

"When you engage with a community online in a constructive way, it can be one of the most meaningful experiences of your life."

Great explainer by Jay Rosen about context.

Brilliance, really well thought out piece.

"And a week or so later, when you try to remember what you said at this party, that really terrific thing, you rack your brain, but can’t quite come up with it. That’s Twitter.

The blog, on the other hand, is slow, reliably reference-able, and findable. It’s like a speech, prepared in advance, with the text distributed. Some will hear the speech on the day it’s delivered, but others will be able to reference its text across the years."

Fascinating story about all that can go wrong with the launch of a novel.

Smart words from Gruber on why it's important to link and credit your sources by name.

"Collecting is having all the pearls lose on the table, curating is stringing them together into a necklace."

"Why do these systems feel more optimized for getting shit in, and not getting something good out of it? Leave that side out, and it’s just a pile of gold in a storage locker."

Fantastic article about Bill Simmons and what comes with being the nation's top sportswriter.

Cool tutorial for setting up a one step publishing workflow from iA's Writer to WordPress. Bonus points for working with WordPress.com and self-hosted installations.

"Technology gave us the tools to map these news communities and engage directly with their members. But it is the oldest journalistic skill of all which gives this process meaning and that is engagement. It is the skill most easily overlooked in the rush towards a brand new journalism: the supreme importance of interaction between two human beings."

"In a way, I have to pretend that I’m the only site out there. That if someone was interested in the things I’m interested in, how then would they find out about those things unless I wrote about them? I can’t pass by something I find exciting or interesting because I see that others are already talking about it. That would be a road to silence."

Shawn Blanc details how software plays a role in his daily gig as a blogger. Interesting to see how it all fits together.

Ben Brooks reviews Writer for Mac. Sounds like a solid writing app.

Interesting piece on why privacy matters.

"But when people turn into just information, we lose something important. We lose the rules of engagement, we lose our etiquette. And even though we may be part of a social network, manners don’t matter much when you’re alone."

Jon Udell writing about the physics of virtual objects and how that transforms our understanding of the world.

Beautiful essay by Merlin Mann. Really great stuff.

Ben Brooks changes his blog navigation as well.

A few years ago when traveling I had a meal at a tapas bar on a slow Tuesday night, and struck up a conversation with the chef in the open kitchen. She told me that the key to a good meal is matching the chef’s time: take as much time to eat the dish as it took to prepare it. I always filed it away in my head, but never quite knew how to classify the sentiment. It’s just within the past few days that I’ve understood that the reason I liked the thought so much was because of how kind it seemed. To match attention is to be kind.

"Let the design and the structure and the dynamics of your website underpin the words and style of your writing. Because all of it adds up to form the voice of you and your weblog."

Shawn Blanc writes about different approaches to the bottom links in a blog.

Great interview with Felix Salmon about how blogging has changed journalism.

Tim Bray writes about what blogging is like and how to approach it.

Robin Sloan's brilliant piece about stock and flow in online content.

Shawn Blanc kicks off his first day as a full time writer.

"Really writing forces us to lock the words into whatever contraption is being used to write. I like typewriters because it’s hard to take out the paper and crumple it up while writing. The easiest movement is FORWARD. Typewriters are momentum machines. Real writing pushes forward. Tweets push in every direction at once. These are not value judgements, these are just some observations."

Shawn Blanc writes about what it takes to be a great tech writer. It necessitates time spent away from the screen doing meaningful things.

A tale of dreams, debt, and heartbreak in California.

Adam Werbach at The Atlantic writes a guide to the basics of using Twitter.

"When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. When you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance."

Mandy Brown writes about a better-designed web.

Joel Johnson writes about the Foxconn factory in China.

Dave Winer's got his minimal blogging tool up and running. Sounds cool.

Blogging has legs and is really just a way to instantaneously publish online.

Cool essay about work and what it means to Jeffrey Essmann.

"Do I want to be a capital “W” Writer? Yes. Do I want all my writing to feel like Writing? Yes. But I have to be okay with the fact that right now, I’m not and it doesn’t. I’m just a writer and most of the time writing is hard. It may never be otherwise."

"Things are not as they should be. And yet, it feels as if we are all in the right place."

Shawn Blanc is turning his site into a full-time gig. A $3 monthly membership fee is part of how he'll make the financial side of things work.

One school benefits by ditching mass emails and keeping all communication on a staff blog. The information is archived, searchable, and comments beat the heck out of traditional email.

Alex Payne talks about the coming wave of video-based communication.

"These habits are designed to create unexpected moments with Signal. Each moment with Signal is a moment that you’re killing the Noise and they exist so you remember what it feels like to care rather than just do."

Randy Murray writes about why he uses a pen and paper for his meeting notes.

"Imagine a web publishing platform that costs $10 per month.

$5 of that $10 goes to the platform company for the boring stuff.

The other $5 gets split evenly between the writers, photographers, videographers, designers, and other creative people you follow who also pay to use the platform, up to a maximum of — say — 20 followers, hand-picked by you."

"Given enough time, and without substantial changes to the way the big social networks work, if you didn't blog it, it didn't happen. In fact, I first wrote about this idea a bit on Twitter a few years ago. See if you can find it."

"Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively."

"Hypothesis: It doesn’t make the world any worse to add more information to it, since we can’t be/feel more overloaded than we already do."

David Cohn is back with his carnival of journalistic fun.

Perhaps listening to authors speak about their works in podcasts is a more effective way to understand their thoughts.

"I worry about the medium, because not enough designers are working in that vast middle ground between eye candy and hardcore usability where most of the web must be built. And there are fewer and fewer incentives for web designers to toil in these fields, since this type of work pleases web users but wins absolutely no recognition from the industry, aside from a paycheck."

Some interesting insight into the design of a particularly minimal blog.

Rands' seven precious books and what they mean to him.

Time lapse video of writing 1000 words from Scott Berkun.

"If you are a service organization or have to deal with customers, there’s something here for you to learn: a customer with a problem is an opportunity. Empathize with them. Take responsibility. Do your best to resolve the issue. If you do that, you’ll tie the customer closer to you than others who never have a problem."

Great idea for analyzing language in support responses. Could be nifty in Automattic.

"You ever order soup at a restaurant and get a bowl that’s mostly broth?

The problem is the register at the restaurant is four-hundred bucks under what it was the day before, and everyone is running around screaming “No one wants to buy our soup!” Then they start looking for different ways to distribute the soup. Do they buy new ladles? Would people like it if the ladles were fancier? “Let’s buy new bowls. People would enjoy the new bowls,” they say. Customers could choose the bowl that best fits their personality, or how they’re feeling that day, or whether they’re having the soup for lunch or for dinner."

"...when good writing is in abundance, I only want to read the very best of it. If you care about your craft, then write me a short letter—I’ll pay more for it."

Bold investigative journalism in Ghana.

John James Jacoby lays out how WordPress posts have evolved over the years.

Some tips on how to approach research projects to make the most of innovative contributors.

"But everybody should care about the principle of heads, decks, and leads. We're all publishers. We publish in order to be found, to be read, to connect, to have influence. When we're careful about how we package and layer our information, we become more effective publishers."

"I would tell everyone how awesome it was. A common refrain back then was "not everyone should have a printing press." I didn't agree then and I don't agree now."

Great idea for a writing course from Jason Fried. I'd take this course.

Ray Ozzie's parting letter to Microsoft.

"Similarly, it's likely that the future of blogging -- and the future spread of knowledge -- will reflect the characteristics of whatever blog platform achieves dominance. Increasingly it appears that the winner will be WordPress."

Intriguing argument against Happy Cog's new form of comments.

"The art of the connection is the end result of a nerd’s highly obsessive due diligence performed on anything that falls into the relevant bucket."

A brilliant essay about white American politics and the bordering insanity.

How Shawn Blanc writes and article.

Captivating story about what's happening with Kafka's original writing manuscripts.

Rands' ideas about 1:1 business meetings. Some helpful teams from the team lead point of view.

One interesting way of using Notational Velocity.